Experimental film maker Gerard Courant has taken Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and sped up it (or compressed it as he prefers to call it) into a four minute movie.

The French title of Godard’s debut film is À bout de souffle which translates to English as “out of breath.” Courant’s compression is most likely a play on the title.

What I find interesting about the compression is the way it brings Godard’s style and the American noir films he was inspired by to the foreground. The nervous energy of the film, the pans and tracking shots, cigarettes smoked, automobiles in motion, zooms, jump-cuts, and close-ups, all create an angular yet fluid motion that seems driven by forces of destiny - the movie is tumbling into a dark void of betrayal and its opposite - yin and yanging to the beat beat beat of a heart in the throes of atrial tachycardia. No time to catch your breath - you’re breathless.

Fucking with Godard’s masterpiece is very Godardian.

If, as Godard claims, “cinema is truth at 24 frames per second” what is cinema at 524 frames per second?

1 A.M. (aka One American Movie) was shot in 1968, abandoned by Godard in 1969, and then later resurrected and re-edited by his collaborator on the film D.A. Pennebaker. Intercut with film footage of Godard at work on the film and re-named 1 P.M. (One Parallel Movie), it was finally released in 1972.

An abstract and maddening mash-up of cinéma vérité, documentary footage and goofy political theater, 1 P.M. is another attempt by a European director to wrap his head around America’s turbulent Sixties’ political scene and pretty much failing. Even with input from ace documentarian Pennebaker, the movie seems remote from its material. But despite many yawn-inducing moments of pretentiousness and arthouse vagueness, there are still plenty of interesting bits and pieces in the film to sustain one’s interest. Specifically, an interview with Eldridge Cleaver, a rambling but fascinating sequence involving Tom Hayden. Rip Torn’s absurd Native American routine and a Manhattan-rooftop performance by Jefferson Airplane of “House at Pooneil Corners,” which ends with the cops busting the band and film crew.

Michael Baute and Bettina Blickwede have taken moving imagery from 47 films directed by Jean Luc Godard and created loops based on recurring motifs in the director’s work. These include automobiles, guns, color, faces, sound and more.

Using split screens, the loops act as a kind of optical music in which themes and colors riff off of each other in a Godardian eye view of the modern world.

For the story behind the creation of these loops and to see more of them visit Fandor’s website.

Godard is one of the prime architects of cinema as language, a language in which vowels and consonants find their counterparts in color, light and movement. Rimbaud spoke of this derangement of the senses a century ago. Godard acted on it, but without Rimbaud’s symbolist lyricism or surrealism. Godard, like Warhol, let the images speak for themselves, without embellishment. And speak they do, as clearly as any alphabet based on the interaction between teeth, tongue and breath. If Gertrude Stein had made films instead of books, she would have found in Godard a kindred spirit. “A gun is a gun is a gun is a gun.”